1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the displaying of advertisement in a communication personal media space, and more particularly, selecting on-line advertisement by a user to display in the user's communication personal media space for friends and/or acquaintances approved by the user to view.
2. Description of the Related Art
On-line advertising may be used by advertisers to accomplish various business goals, ranging from building brand awareness among potential customers to facilitating on-line purchases of products or services. A number of different kinds of page-based or video-based online advertisements are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a page to be configured to contain a location for inclusion of an advertisement. Some Internet technologies enable rich video to be used to create high quality advertisements
One type of on-line advertisement is banner advertisement. A banner advertisement typically features an image (animated or static) and/or text displayed at a predetermined position in a page. The banner advertisement usually takes the form of a horizontal rectangle at the top of the page, but it can also be arranged in a variety of other shapes at any other location on the page. If a user clicks on the banner advertisement's location, image, and/or text, the user is taken to a new page that may provide detailed information regarding the products or services associated with the banner advertisement. Banner advertisements are often provided on a guaranteed number of impressions basis, though they may also be performance-based.
However, most of the on-line advertisements are not effective in reaching the on-line users because the advertisers have no knowledge or only very limited knowledge of the users. The advertisers often can only target the advertisement based on the vague understanding of the demographics of users viewing certain web sites or pages. Therefore, most of on-line advertisement is either not targeted at all, or not targeted effectively. Since the on-line advertisement is presented to the users with little or no knowledge of the on-line users, the chances for the on-line users to be interested in the advertisements are small. And, most users that are on-line simply choose to ignore a majority of on-line advertisements.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for methods for selecting advertisements to display to users that users would find relevant. When users find the selected advertisements, which are displayed to the users, relevant to the users, the users are more likely to view the advertisement.